Pentaho® Kettle Solutions: Building Open Source ETL Solutions with Pentaho Data Integration

Appendix A. The Kettle Ecosystem

By now you have probably discovered that developing ETL solutions using Kettle is not only easy but also a lot of fun. To make it even easier and more fun than it already is, you probably want to get in touch with other Kettle fans. In some circumstances you might also run into something that doesn't work as expected and you need to find out if it's just you that's having this problem or if it's an already known problem. Finally, you want to keep up-to-date on the latest developments, try out new features or even contribute to the Kettle community. This appendix is meant to introduce you to all the sites and tools that make up the Kettle ecosystem.

Kettle Development and Versions

The code base of the Kettle project is under heavy development and changes almost daily. Bugs are fixed, new features are added, and optimizations are being implemented constantly. As a consequence, five versions are available for use, each in its own stage of the product lifecycle. The following list explains the various options for obtaining the software and their maturity, from the GA (General Availability) to Trunk (source code you need to build and compile yourself):

• GA (General Availability) version: The most stable version of Kettle and probably the one you will be using in a production environment. In fact, we don't recommend any other version than GA for use in production, period. The GA version has undergone heavy unit and integration testing and is used by thousands ...